KfH

I always enjoy preparing a poster for the #NHSHE2016 Conference organised by London Health Libraries (now with added KSS). There are always good prizes and the chance to create something to make the office look less dull while sharing a piece of work. We were tasked with the theme of Knowledge for Healthcare which was pretty straightforward as this encompasses pretty much anything you care to look at professionally these days.

My main direct involvement with KfH has been around metrics. The presentation I gave at HLG2016 Scarborough brought home to me the need to make the materials we had produced in the Metrics Task and Finish group more accessible. It was also clear that people were interested if things were put to them clearly. So a poster on Metrics was the obvious outcome. I went with trying to hammer home the message about the four principles and what they mean in practice. Using MARC as an acrostic had the bonus of chucking in a feeble nerdy library pun.

The poster was well received. While it came only 6th out of 9 in the popular vote this was a step forward on last years metrics poster which was a rare non prizewinner. A few people verbally told me how clear and helpful they had found it. I was really pleased to see a tweet afterwards sharing the poster with a group of other libraries after it had been raised at a network meeting. I am hoping that people will share with me examples of how they have used the metrics work.

Next steps are to create a version of this post for the KfH blog and move on with the plans to set up a national metrics collection tool.